title: How do hospitalization experience and institutional characteristics influence inpatient satisfaction? A multilevel approach.
abstract: Over the last several years, interest in benchmarking health services' quality--particularly patient satisfaction (PS)--across organizations has increased. Comparing patient experiences of care across hospitals requires risk adjustment to control for important differences in patient case-mix and provider characteristics. This study investigates the individual-level and organizational-level determinants of PS with public hospitals by applying hierarchical models. The analysis focuses on the effect of hospital characteristics, such as self-discharges, on overall evaluations and on across hospital variation in scores. Sociodemographics, admission mode, place of residence, hospitalization ward and continuity of care were statistically significant predictors of inpatient satisfaction. Interestingly, it was observed that hospitals with a higher percentage of Patients Leaving Against Medical Advice (PLAMA) received lower scores. The latter result suggests that the percentage of PLAMA may provide a useful measure of a hospital's inability to meet patient needs and a proxy indicator of PS with hospital care.
authors.affiliation: Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Laboratorio Management e Sanità, Istituto di Management, Pisa, Italy.
authors.forename: Anna Maria
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Murante
authors.forename: Chiara
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Seghieri
authors.forename: Adalsteinn
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Brown
authors.forename: Sabina
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Nuti
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D019985:Benchmarking; D005260:Female; D006302:Health Services Research; D006760:Hospitalization; D006801:Humans; D007297:Inpatients / Q000523:psychology*; D007558:Italy; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D017060:Patient Satisfaction; D011787:Quality of Health Care; D020379:Risk Adjustment; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D016312:Treatment Refusal / Q000706:statistics & numerical data
keywords: patient experience; risk adjustment; voluntary discharges